1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of asset valuation and, in particular, to the field of valuing or rating patents and other intellectual property assets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Patents play an important role in our economy in encouraging private investment in the development of new technologies that improve productivity and quality of life for everyone. Each year more than a quarter-million patent applications are filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”) resulting annually in the issuance of over a hundred fifty-thousand patents. Patent owners and applicants pay combined annual fees and costs of nearly a billion dollars (about $6,700 per issued patent) to the PTO to prosecute and maintain their patents and applications. This does not include the additional fees and costs expended for related professional services, such as attorneys fees and drafting charges.
In addition, each year thousands of patent infringement suits are brought in the federal courts seeking to enforce patent rights. In the 12 months ended Jun. 30, 1992, U.S. federal district courts heard a total of 1407 such patent cases through trial. See V. Savikas, “Survey Lets Judges Render Some Opinions About the Patent Bar,” Nat'l L. J., Jan. 18, 1993, at 57. A recent survey conducted by the American Intellectual Property Law Associations (“AIPLA”) reported that the median cost of patent litigation for each side through trial was about $650,000. AIPLA, “Report of Economic Survey” (1991). Other more recent estimates place the cost of patent enforcement litigation somewhere in the range of about $1 million per side through trial. Thus, the aggregate annual cost for obtaining, maintaining and enforcing patents in the United States is easily in the multiple billions of dollars. Similar costs are incurred by patentees in various other foreign countries where patents may be obtained and enforced.
Because of the great importance of patents in the both the U.S. and global economies there has been continued interest in quantifying the intrinsic value of patents and their contribution to economic prosperity of the individuals or companies that hold and/or control them. Such information can be useful for a variety of purposes. For example, patent holders themselves may be interested in using such information to help guide future decision-making or for purposes of tax treatment, transfer pricing or settlement of patent license disputes. Financial advisors and investors may seek to use such information for purposes of comparative value analysis and/or to construct measures of the “fundamental value” of publicly traded companies for purposes of evaluating possible strategic acquisitions or as a guide to investment. Economists may seek to use patent valuations for purposes of economic forecasting and planning. Insurance carriers may use such valuations to set insurance policy premiums and the like for insuring intangible assets. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,714, incorporated herein by reference.
However, accurate valuing of patents and other intangible intellectual property assets is a highly difficult task and requires an understanding of a broad range of legal, technical and accounting disciplines. Intellectual property assets are rarely traded in open financial markets or sold at auction. They are intangible assets that secure unique benefits to the individuals or companies that hold them and/or exploit the underlying products or technology embodying the intellectual property. In the case of patent assets, for example, this unique value may manifest itself in higher profit margins for patented products, increased market power and/or enhanced image or reputation in the industry and/or among consumers or investors. These and other characteristics of intellectual property assets make such assets extremely difficult to value.
Intellectual property valuation specialists have traditionally employed three main approaches for valuing patents and other intangible intellectual property assets. These are: (1) the cost-basis approach; (2) the market approach; and (3) the income approach. See, generally, Smith & Par, Valuation of Intellectual Property and Intangible Assets, 2nd Ed. 1989. Each of these traditional accounting-based approaches produces a different measure or estimate of the intrinsic value of a particular intellectual property asset in question. The choice of which approach is appropriate to use in a given circumstance for a given asset is typically determined by a professional accountant or valuation specialist, taking into consideration a variety of underlying assumptions, type of intellectual property asset(s) involved, and how such asset(s) are to be employed or exploited. Each of these approaches and the limitations associated therewith are briefly discussed below.
Cost Basis Approach
The first and simplest approach is the so-called cost-basis approach. This approach is often used for tax appraisal purposes or for simple “book value” calculations of a company's net assets. Underlying this valuation method is the basic assumption that intellectual property assets, on average, have a value roughly equal to their cost-basis. The supporting rationale is that individuals and companies invest in intellectual property asset(s) only when the anticipated economic benefits of the rights to be secured by the intellectual property asset(s) exceed the anticipated costs required to obtain the asset(s), taking into account appropriate risk factors, anticipated rates of return, etc. In theory, a rational economic decision-maker would not invest in a patent or other intellectual property asset if he or she did not believe that it would produce expected economic benefits (tangible or otherwise) at least equal to its anticipated cost-basis.
There are several drawbacks or limitations associated with the cost-basis valuation approach which limit its general applicability. One significant drawback is that the approach assumes a rational economic decision-maker. While such assumption might be statistically valid on a macro scale where many individual decisions and decision-makers are implicated (e.g., valuing all patents or a large subset of all patents), it is not necessarily a valid assumption when conducting valuation analysis on a micro scale (e.g., valuing a single patent or a portfolio of patents). It is one thing to assume that, on average, individual investment decisions and decision-makers are rational and economically motivated. It is a wholly different thing to assume that “each” investment decision or decision-maker is rational and economically motivated.
For a variety of reasons certain individuals or companies may invest uneconomically in patents or other intellectual property assets—for example, to achieve personal recognition or to superficially “dress up” balance sheets to attract potential investors or buyers. A variety of individual psychological factors may also influence investment decisions producing sometimes irrational or non-economical decisions. For example, the so-called “lottery effect” may encourage some individuals or companies to over-invest in highly speculative technologies that have the seductive allure of potentially huge economic rewards, but very little if any probability of success. Yet others may invest uneconomically in patents and/or other intellectual property assets because of fundamental misunderstandings or misinformation concerning the role of intellectual property and how it can be realistically and effectively exploited.
But even assuming a well-informed, rational, economically-motivated decision-maker, the cost-basis approach is still susceptible to inherent uncertainties in the decision-maker's informed and honest projections of the anticipated economic benefits to be gained by a patent or other intellectual property asset. These benefits are often unknown even to the patentee until well after the patent has been applied for and often not until long after the patent has issued. Many new inventions that may look promising on paper or in the laboratory turn out to be economically or commercially infeasible for a variety of reasons and, as a result, patents covering such inventions may have little if any ultimate intrinsic economic value. Other inventions that may seem only marginal at the time the patent is applied for may turn out to be extremely valuable and, if a broad scope of protection is obtained, may return economic benefits far in excess of the cost-basis of the patent. The cost basis approach thus fails to differentiate between these two extremes because (all other things being equal) the cost basis is the same for securing a patent on the worthless invention as it is for securing a patent on the valuable invention.
The cost-basis approach also does not account for the possibility of evolution of products and technology over time and changing business and economic conditions. Rather, the cost-basis approach implicitly assumes a static business and economic environment, providing a fixed value based on actual costs expended at the time of the initial investment without taking into account how the value of that investment might change over time. As a result of these and other short-comings, the cost-basis approach has only limited utility as a method for accurately estimating the intrinsic economic value of patents or other intellectual property assets in real-world business environments.
Market Approach
The second traditional valuation approach—the market approach—seeks to provide real-world indications of value by studying transactions of similar assets occurring in free and open markets. In theory, the market approach can provide very accurate measures or estimates of intrinsic value. In practice, however, there are very few open financial markets that support active trading of intellectual property and other similar intangible assets. Most intellectual property assets are bought or sold in private transactions involving sales of entire businesses or portions of businesses. And even if the financial particulars of each such transaction were readily available, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to disaggregate the intellectual property assets involved in the transaction from the other assets and allocate an appropriate value to them.
As a result of these and other practical difficulties, there is presently very little direct real-World data on which to base market comparisons of intellectual property and other similar intangible assets. Nevertheless, several interesting studies have been reported which attempt indirectly to extract market-based valuations of patents and other intellectual property assets by studying the stock prices of various publicly traded companies that hold such assets. See, Hall, “Innovation and Market Value,” Working Paper No. 6984 NBER (1999); and Cockburn et al., “Industry Effects and Appropriability Measures in the Stock Market's Valuation of R&D and Patents,” Working Paper No. 2465 NBER (1987).
While interesting in their approach, the usefulness of the methodologies taught by these studies in terms of valuing individual patent and other intellectual property assets is limited. Such indirect market-based valuation approaches mostly attempt to establish only a generalized correlation between stock prices of publicly traded companies and the aggregate number of intellectual property assets held or controlled by those companies. Because individual stock prices are generally reflective of the overall aggregated assets of a company and its future earnings potential, such indirect market-valuation approaches do not lend themselves readily to valuing individual identified intellectual property assets. Moreover, intellectual property and other intangible assets owned by publicly traded companies comprise only a fraction of the total population of potential intellectual property assets that may be of interest.
A computer-automated variation of the traditional market approach specifically adapted for rating patent portfolios is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,907. In this case, a first database is provided containing information describing selected characteristics of a portfolio of patents to be acquired. A second database is provided containing empirical data describing selected characteristics of representative patent portfolios having known market values. Estimated valuations are obtained by comparing information in the first data base to information in the second database to determine which known patent portfolio the portfolio to be acquired matches the closest. The value of the closest matching known portfolio is then used as a rough approximation of the value of the portfolio to be acquired.
While such approach provides an innovative variation of the market-based valuation technique described above, it is again ultimately limited by the need to acquire relevant market data of known patent portfolios. As noted above, such information is very difficult to obtain. Unless a large amount of such data could be collected and analyzed, the effectiveness and accuracy of such an approach would be very limited. Even if a large amount of such data could be collected and stored in a suitable computer-accessible database, the process of individually retrieving and comparing relevant characteristics of each representative portfolio in the database would be undesirably time consuming, even using a high-speed computer. Moreover, the statistical accuracy of the resulting approximated valuations would be undetermined.
Income Approach
The third and perhaps most commonly used accounting-based approach for valuing intellectual property and other intangible assets is the so-called income approach. This approach can provide accurate and credible valuations of intellectual property assets in certain situations where an isolated stream (or streams) of economic benefit can be identified and attributed to an intellectual property asset in question. The income approach values an intellectual property asset by capitalizing or discounting to present value all future projected revenue streams likely to be derived from its continued exploitation. For example, if a patent asset is licensed under an agreement that provides for a predictable income stream over a certain period of time into the future, then the intrinsic value of the patent may be accurately calculated by taking the net discounted present value of the residual income stream (less any scheduled maintenance costs). Similarly, if the patentee is directly exploiting the patent itself, the intrinsic value of the patent may be calculated by taking the net discounted value of the incremental profit stream (assuming it can be identified) attributable to the patent over the remaining life of the patent or the economic life of the patented technology.
In theory, the income valuation approach can produce very accurate estimates of intrinsic value for certain intellectual property and other intangible assets. In practice, however, it is often difficult to identify with certainty and precision an isolated income stream attributable to a particular intellectual property asset in question, let alone an income stream that is predictable over time. In addition, many intellectual property assets, particularly newly issued patents, are not licensed or exploited at all and, therefore, there are no identifiable income streams upon which to base a valuation.
In such circumstances many asset valuation specialists attempt to project possible or hypothetical future revenue streams or economic benefits based on available data of other similar companies in the industry and/or other license agreements for similar intellectual property assets in the same general technical field. Some patent valuation experts have even established extensive data-bases of patent licenses and have attempted to establish a schedule of “standard” or baseline royalty rates or royalty ranges for patent licenses in various industries for purposes of forecasting possible future revenue streams. While such information can be very helpful, without an actual demonstrated income stream or other proven economic benefit, the income-based valuation approach loses credibility and can become more speculation than valuation.
Each of the above valuation approaches has its characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Of course, no single valuation method can provide absolute certainty of the true intrinsic value of an asset. This is especially true when valuing patents and other intangible intellectual property assets. Nevertheless, a need exists for a comparative valuation technique that overcomes the aforementioned problems and limitations and which does not require collecting comparative market data of existing patent portfolios or calculating future hypothetical income streams or royalty rates. There is a further need for an intellectual property valuation method that produces statistically accurate valuations, ratings or rankings according to a determined statistical accuracy.